Monday, October 15, 2012

The fantastic and oh-so-industrious Larissa over at Papa Is A Preacher has started TidBit Thursday, a link-up party and guess who's ever-so-late to the party? (It's Thursday somewhere, right? In an alternate universe, maybe? So alternate me, better in every way, is punctual as always.) My two-birds-with-one-stone excuse for both my lateness and the fact that this Media Monday post will largely be yet another collection of other people's words is that the past week or two has been go-go-go around here with Youngest Sister's family's visit from California and the recovery at work from the time I took off to (thoroughly) enjoy that visit. Add in a slow-moving but all-absorbing cold and you have not only the most-hyphenated post in the history of Masked Mom, but a recipe for bloggy laziness.So here I am, with more quotes culled from my Post-It-befeathered quote notebooks. When it comes to quotations, I'm like Hubby is with every found screw, scrap of wood, or loose bolt. He saves every single tidbit he stumbles across because "You never know when you might need it." Twenty-plus years of socking away everybody else's breathtaking turns-of-phrase, wisps of witty wisdom, and eloquently-put epiphanies and I could wallpaper my house with these things. I figure Hubby will be happier if I just share another batch of them here instead. "Hard work may pay off in the long run, but the benefits of laziness are immediate."

~~Marc Acito, How I Paid For College: A Novel of Sex, Theft Friendship, and Musical Theater

"In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of the family is to drown it out."

~~Joyce Carol Oates, We Were The Mulvaneys

"Ultimately, other people are amateurs compared to me in the horrible things I can say about myself. I cannot even bear to list the things that fill my mind during these episodes of self-loathing. I think we all have our own messages, the tapes that play over and over in our minds, that weaken us, that desecrate the holiness of our lives, that come disguised as a way to motivate ourselves, when really they are all about self-sabotage."

~~Margaret Cho, I'm The One That I Want

"Cliches are like those little crosses you see at the side of highways: They mark a place where a genuine feeling or insight has met its end."

Monday, October 08, 2012

"I think all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurace, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity, no matter what."

~~Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

"Words dice the world into pieces small enough for the mind to hold, but the world itself is undivided. Every being, from lilac to lover, overflows the boundaries of its name."

~~Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe

"...I suppose this--the ability to empathize with the people we hate--is exactly the quality that makes us human beings, which makes you wonder why anybody would want to be one."

~~Brock Clarke, An Arsonist's Guide To Writer's Homes In New England

"One of my problems is that I like to be nicer than I actually am. While this personality discrepancy is better than being unkind, it does create a lot of confusion and pain for me as well as for others."

~~Mary-Lou Weisman, Traveling While Married

"A love of language may not guarantee happiness, but it allows you to express your despair eloquently. As any poet (or blogger) knows, misery expressed is misery reduced."

~~Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search For The Happiest Place In The World

"There are some people who insist that every time one door closes, another door opens, but this isn't always the case. There are doors that are meant to stay closed, ones that lead to rooms filled with serpents, rooms of regret, rooms that will blind you if you dare to raise your eyes to the keyhole in all innocence, simply to see what's inside."

~~Alice Hoffman, The Blue Diary

"The woman looked as if she thought Inman spoke the greatest foolishness she had ever heard. She pointed her pipe stem at him and said, You listen. Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless."

~~Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

"I would take a vow not to worry so much but I would have to have a prefrontal lobotomy to keep the vow and that seems excessive."

Monday, October 01, 2012

A couple of weeks ago, Margi over at The M Half of the M-n-J Show posted about her struggles with depression in "Depression is a Lying Sack." If you've ever dealth with depression, you should definitely read it--and if you've never dealt with depression, maybe it's even more important that you read it. It's full of links to other posts on the topic as well as a glimpse into Margi's personal struggles with the illness.Margi's discussion of the lies depression tells her reminded me of a quote from Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron about what might be called depression's most dangerous lie:

"In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come--not in a day, an hour, a month or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul."

While I have struggled with depression (a.k.a. capital-F Funks) off and on since my teenage years, the depression Styron suffered--and recorded in this slim volume--was of an entirely different magnitude than my own. Nevertheless, Styron's work resonated because he was able to eloquently articulate so many feelings that I'd had but had never been able to put into words before. The book is an unflinching journey alongside a man trudging through a debilitating illness. The writing is spare and evocative, deeply felt but simply written.

Years ago, a friend of Daughter-Only's said, "Misery loves company, but company only likes misery as a friend." It struck me at the time as kind of sneakily profound. I'm not sure how I feel about it now, but I do know that there is tremendous comfort to be found in knowing we're not alone.

About Me

Who is that Masked Mom? I'm the mother of four children, ages 21 to 28, grandma to one, employed full-time in the chemical dependency field, writer in personality if not always in practice,married twenty-eight years, waiting less and less patiently for all the hard-earned wisdom to kick in so I can relax and coast a while....